Alpha and Omega
by Neale
Summary: This one will be a bridal structure "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue". It starts about twelve years after the end of Bad Pennies but it will have a lot of flashbacks to the early days of the series' characters.
1. Chapter 1

**OK, this story is going to be a bit of a "bridal" structure, no, not weddings, but rather the tried and true "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue". Old - significant parts will be flashbacks to the series' characters' early years, and what were (to me at least) significant moments in the series. New – The story will start about twelve years after the end of Bad Pennies, and there will be some new and possibly interesting elements. Borrowed – some of the writers here have come out with some great concepts and a form of them may come out in parts of the story. Blue – there will be depressing elements, there may even be other "blue" elements, who knows?**

**Usual disclaimer for the Land of Litigation, no rights held to any characters portrayed.**

In the fifteen years that Quantum Concepts had existed, quite a few things had developed, BGRU was still in the shadows, but unfortunately it was stronger than ever, the leadership ruled with an iron fist, and they could see Langston Graham's particular "flair" in the operations, so it was a good bet that as young as his clones were, they were already playing a role in running the organisation. QC was going strong, there were about a thousand people all up in QC now, of which over a quarter was made up of Clan Carmichael (including the Bartowski clones), another quarter (or there abouts) were the foster parents of the clones, and the remainder were the cream of their fields that had been hired to bring the company's capabilities up to the levels they wanted/needed in the chosen areas.

Clan Carmichael had grown by more than the Bartowski clones joining the family, as there was a side effect of the Bartowski Intersect that no-one had considered, the repair function triggered by the BI obviously corrected any fertility issues as well as other ailments, as all of the women in the family who had loaded the BI had had babies. It was a toss up as to who was the most surprised at first, Chuck or Carina (as the BI had repaired both Chuck's "snip" and Carina's mission related injuries which had rendered her unable to bear children), but there was no question that Ellie had the prize for the most embarrassed/ashamed, given who the father of her twins Castor and Pollux was (everyone had gotten dead drunk and wild that night, but while waking up with a horrendous hangover, Charlie in her bed and no memory of what happened after the party was shameful, finding out that she was pregnant nearly two months later was MUCH worse). The best that they could ascertain was that the BI triggered the repair of pretty much any issues in all of them for as long as they had it, and it had been the stress that they were under, fighting BGRU and finding out about the clones which had suppressed fertility as long as they were fighting the war. Whatever the reason, it was soon after they settled down to build their new lives (and right after the wild celebration they'd had to commemorate the end of the darkest days, actually) that Sarah, Ellie and Yvonne became pregnant. Carina, Alex and Zondra weren't much later, but at least Carina was immediately certain who the father was, as she wasn't the party girl any more, it took a bit of thinking on Zondra and Alex's part to be sure who the fathers were as they'd had more than one partner over the previous few months.

Over the next ten to twelve years, all the women in the family had had one or more babies (Even Mary, Kathleen, Diane and Emma expanded their families, as the affect of the BI on the hosts' bodies seemed to seriously retard, if not reset, the ageing process. The older women had known, of course, that they were getting their periods again, but hadn't considered that they may get pregnant), so the family was getting rather larger. Mary was probably running second to Ellie in the embarrassment stakes due to having great grandchildren who were actually older than her youngest son (Yvonne got pregnant around the same time as Sarah and Ellie and her baby was over a month premature, but Lisa was perfect and healthy when she was born, and Castor and Pollux were only a month or so younger). Still, the twins' father was definitely a cause for considerable family friction, and it took Clara some time before she was able to speak to her mother after she found out who he was.

Things were rather strained around Greg (Yvonne's baby's father) for a while, but he was a good man, only a few years older than Yvonne and they'd been friends for a while. The fact that he was close enough to the Clan to be part of the party said something about their view of him, and it had been a very similar story to Ellie and Charlie's, they were both blind drunk and woke up the next morning not knowing quite what had happened, but it was something that they'd both chosen. Greg was supportive of Yvonne and helped with the baby (and submitted to the battery of extensive tests that Ellie forced on him in an attempt to make sure that the baby would be as healthy as possible without complaint). Actually the tests showed that, as well as being totally clean, genetically Greg was the male equivalent of Sarah, so it was going to be quite interesting to see how Lisa developed.

Aside from the rampant fertility side effect of the BI (which may or may not have been a benefit, given that it basically invalidated most forms of contraception), the BI's repair function was a wonder, going by the results of medical examinations, scans and tests on the older members of the clan, it was looking like everyone could expect to be well over a hundred and still going strong, none of them were showing any of the normal signs of deteriorating bodies or mental capacity that were expected in people past retirement age, and they were quite active and sharp enough to do anything people thirty years or more younger could be expected to do (well maybe not the people who made up the clan, but most people). Once again, Ellie wished that she could share this with the world, as it could improve the lives of so many people, but she knew that any mention of it would paint a target on them which could possibly destroy them all, so she kept the family's secret.

Getting used to the lack of sleep again and the constant changing, feeding etc requirements was hard for Sarah and Ellie, and harder still for Mary, Kathleen and Emma, but Carina, Zondra, Alex, Yvonne and Diane had never gone through this before and they had no idea of how to handle it. The fact that Zondra, Alex and Yvonne didn't have established partners to help out was that much harder on them (though Yvonne and Alex did have their parents to help out, and Zondra had help from the others). Though it was hard, having babies around the house brought quite a bit of joy to the family, and especially to their parents.

Having the babies around also brought back memories for some of them, when Emma had her baby (her father was one of the senior analysts in QC that she'd had a close friendship with for a while), she was a blue eyed blonde angel who was so much like Sarah was when she was born that Emma cried as she remembered what life had been like then. Jack was initially so tied up with having a little girl that he stopped running his cons and went straight for nearly a year, he was never really a good father (he couldn't/wouldn't have done a fraction of what Chuck did whenever there were babies or children to be looked after), but he made an effort, he actually held down a job for a while and stayed home with her and Sarah when he wasn't working, they felt like a real family. Of course, that couldn't last with Jack, and when Sarah was about 8 - 9 months old he started saying that he had to go back to the cons as they were running out of money, within a month he was back in the game full time, usually only turning to her when he needed her to set up a con for him after that. He'd turned his back on her and their daughter as soon as it stopped being new and interesting, and less than three years later after that things turned much worse thanks to his actions. Emma would often smile when she looked back on the time that Samantha was a baby, because whenever she'd start thinking that she was as alone as she was when Sarah was a baby, Sarah, or Chuck, or one of the others in the family would come in to see her and usually offer to take Samantha for a while to give her some time for herself, she wasn't alone any more, her daughter had drawn her into a wonderful family, a wonderful life.

Kathleen's memories weren't that different from Emma's, being back with John and having another baby brought back what happened after she found that she was pregnant with Alex, getting the knock on the door to tell her that her fiancée was dead, sitting at his funeral pregnant and alone, and having to have the baby and raise her on her own without any support from her family. (The joy of coming from a good catholic family, when they found out that she was pregnant and was having a child out of wedlock, they cut her off as if she had no idea who the father was, even though she had been engaged to Alex. It wasn't until some of the younger ones in the family were old enough to stand up to the family at large that anyone in her family reached out to her, and Alex was in school by then.) She understood that the phone had been taken from Alex/John before she could tell him that she was pregnant, and knew that he would have come straight back to her if he'd known (well, she was pretty sure he would have), but all the pain and hardship and loneliness of having and raising Alex without any support from anyone came back to her when she was having another baby. Things were so much different this time, John and Alex were both there with her (though Alex had a baby herself, and it was a little embarrassing to know that her grandson would be older than her youngest daughter), and she had this incredible family around her to give her love, support and assistance, Joanna was going to be surrounded with love, and that made her cry to think that Alex had missed out on that, all Alex had had was her.

Ellie's recollections were quite different from the older women, where they had been largely alone to deal with their pregnancies and the babies, she'd been smothered by Devon obsessing over every detail and having long, involved conversations with her belly (though he did bail on her in the delivery until John slapped some sense into him and sent him back in to her (even though he was the only family she had there until the last minute because Chuck and Sarah and her mother were off taking down Volkoff Industries and as far as she knew, her father was dead), she should have read the signs there, it may have saved her a lot of anguish and suffering later on if she'd taken the hint and finished things there). All the time through when Clara was a baby and a toddler it was the same, her husband driving her crazy and showing off to the world what he had made. (Who the hell had gone though everything in the pregnancy and delivery? Not him!) This time, she had support from Charlie as well as Chuck, Sarah, Carina and most of the others, and though there was a fair bit of friction with some (including her parents) over the circumstances, she wasn't being smothered and was surrounded by love and support, all in all it was a much better experience.

All the while that Clan Carmichael was becoming a baby factory, Quantum Concepts was delivering, expanding, and becoming a major force in numerous fields. They'd set things up to branch into the various scientific and technology fields to ensure that there were opportunities for the Bartowski clones to join the family business (and be able to develop and grow in the business), but also because they had identified many fields as the significant upcoming threats and opportunities (like micro-biology, where Charlie had decided to focus his attentions). Therefore, when these fields came to the fore, QC was well positioned to deal with the threat or seize the opportunity, as the case may be. Of the thousand or so in QC, over three quarters were engaged in science and technology fields, and the calibre of of nearly everyone they had in those fields was among the best there was.

Nearly all of the Bartowski clones (or their lost children, as Sarah and Chuck had come to view them) had finished their studies and had taken their place in the family business now, so it was often like being in a bizarre dream world (with nearly a quarter of the people in QC sharing four faces, it was hard to go anywhere in QC without seeing multiple versions of those faces wherever you looked). Luckily, the personality of the originals that they'd adopted created an environment that was both competitive and co-operative. They were always out to do their best, individually, but were ready and willing to work together (with each contributing in their area of expertise) to get the best results. They didn't seem to feel any need to try to one up each other, and they all (bizarrely) seemed to have that close twins connection, so they could work together closely without needing extensive discussion. Whatever Graham's plans may have been, what he actually created was a very close knit family of over two hundred exceptionally capable and brilliant people, who were in fact dedicated to destroying his legacy, the one that he'd created them to support. Added into that mix were the brothers and sisters who were a little older than them, and brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and cousins (or great nephews, depending on how you wanted to look at it with the twins) who were a little bit younger than them, all of whom helped tie them into the Bartowski family and Clan Carmichael. So the lost children were home and they were family.

Sarah was looking at her lost children and her "natural" children and thought how different (and better) their lives were compared to what her own had been. Thanks to the BI, she remembered far more about her early childhood than she had before, remembering that the only constant was her mother. Things were always strained when her father was there when she was little, her mother couldn't spend the time with her that she did when it was just them, and her father would usually be demanding that her mother get the things he wanted finished and telling her to get out of the way. Sarah was only happy when she had her mother to herself. After a few years, her mother started disappearing for weeks at a time, but she was always desperate to see her and hold her when she came back, with tears in her eyes as she told her that she loved her more than anything. Sarah hadn't understood why she went away, but she knew that she didn't want to, someone was making her do it. Things got worse between her parents after that, her mother didn't work on the things that her father wanted her to any more and they argued about that a lot. It was in that period that her father started taking her out for "adventures" with him when her mother was away, at first it was just day trips and he'd drop her back at grandma's in the afternoon (or more often, at night), but then it would start being for a few days at a time, a week, a few weeks, so that her mother was getting home before he returned her sometimes, which led to quite a few heated arguments between her parents. She still preferred to be with her mother because she loved her, but Jack kept putting a flea in her ear about what her mother was doing and where she was going when she went away, and then her mother wouldn't tell her when she asked, she'd just cry and tell her that she couldn't tell her. This worked into Jack's machinations to convince her that he was being more honest with her than her mother was, and that led to her leaving with him when she was seven.

She spent the next nine years with Jack, learning to be a far better con-artist than he ever could have been, taking over her mother's previous role in planning and organising the cons and trying to keep her father out of trouble. Of course, he hadn't changed at all and would improvise a lot (thinking that he could do better out of it than he would if he stuck to what she'd planned), so there were several times that he got himself caught and spent stretches in jail, and on some of them she'd been put into the foster care system, she shuddered when she thought about the number of close calls she'd had with sleazy foster "fathers" and foster "brothers" before she managed to get away and hide out while she waited for her father to get out of jail. Mind you, the skills she'd taught herself to look after herself and dig up the information about where he was imprisoned and when he'd be released stood her in good stead when she started the next phase of her life, when Graham got her father arrested and put away where he could control him, just so he could get control of her. She forced herself to stop that line of thought as she started shaking at the thought of what she'd gone through then. She jumped, and then relaxed as she realised that it was Chuck who had come up behind her to wrap his arms around her. He knew (as he always did) when she started down that rabbit hole and had come to save her. She craned her head around to kiss him, and when he whispered "love you" in her ear whispered "love you more" back to him as she relaxed into his embrace.


	2. The Lost Children

**Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters portrayed.**

If the Bartowski clones (or the lost children as their parents preferred to refer to them) had to pick the one thing that amazed them more than anything else about their parents, it was the fact that they never failed to identify any of their children, and they had never taken more than twenty seconds to identify them and address them by their preferred name, in their preferred language. That wasn't a bad trick in any large family group, but given that their family had over fifty copies each of four faces (there were over fifty clones for each of the original four children), it was incredible. The clones (lost children) had tried more than once to find the identifying marks when they were together, but for the most part they just couldn't see them even though their parents obviously could. The lost children had acquired their father's voracious appetite for science fiction, and given their rather special status of representing about 2/3 of the world's known human clones, they had soaked up every piece of clone fiction and research material that they could find. As a result of the stories they'd read and the common attitudes that they'd read about, they had also spent quite some time trying to find cracks in their parent's stories about loving them as much as the "natural" children that they were based on, but unless their parents were the best actors in the world, those "stories" were the whole truth. The most common cause for any of the children getting special treatment was when they were pregnant or had a small baby to look after, because their protective instincts kicked in when any of their children were at risk, and they were suckers for babies. (Possibly why they'd had a dozen kids naturally? OK they understood that their mother had a tendency for producing fraternal twins, but weren't the four additional sets of twins in the past ten or so years a bit much to handle?)

In the early days after the lost children came into the fold, whenever the clan identified BGRU facilities and put together raids, they were feeling ostracised and that their loyalty was being questioned when they were always kept out of the teams. That meant that Chuck, Sarah and Ellie had to sit them down to explain that it was more about the additional training that their older bothers and sisters had which could keep them safer, and about the Bartowski Intersect. Chuck and Sarah went over the advantages and protection that the BI gave when in a combat situation, with the enhanced speed, strength, co-ordination, precision and endurance (and enhanced senses) which helped prevent them being injured. They also briefly described the skill sets that could be loaded via the BI which added to those advantages and protections. Then Ellie took over to describe the way that the BI triggered the body's low level repair mechanisms, so that if they DID get injured, they would heal that much faster and more completely, and how it was due to these low level effects on the body that they didn't allow the BI be loaded until the person was far enough into their twenties to ensure that the body's growth and development was finished, with the aim of preventing it from interfering with the body's natural development.

At that point of the discussion, when they were talking to the girls, Ellie and Sarah tended to point out the fertility enhancement aspect of the BI that it had taken them over ten years to find a "fix" for. They didn't need to belabour the point, because anyone in the family could quite clearly see the number of small children around, but they did advise them that they'd managed to come up with a patch to the BI that suppressed fertility when it was unwanted or problematical (like when you keep getting pregnant all the time), and that it could be loaded or removed as required for the girls (they hadn't come up with a similar patch for the guys as the effort was deemed more worthwhile to be put into the girls' side, and that had taken over ten years of work). They did point out that the BI helped keep both mother and baby(s) in the best of health throughout the pregnancy and that it seemed to make the delivery much quicker and easier (Yvonne had very few issues with her first pregnancy, even though she'd only loaded the BI a short time before the party where she got pregnant). Ellie also pointed out that more traditional contraceptive measures were effective up until the BI was loaded, so they could be used to control the situation in the meantime.

Once the lost children knew about the BI, they (of course) wanted to be on board, the ones who were over 21 went through the testing and loaded the full versions of the BI, and all of them went into the complete training program that their brothers and sisters had started as soon as they were old enough. Another thing that they were all made aware of was the history of the family and the plans that had been made in regard to them, in particular the breeding and cloning programs that they were a direct result of, with the transcripts of the significant "interrogations" (along with whatever documentation that had been discovered) being made available to them so that they could fully understand what they were really up against. As they were taking the "children" through this process, Chuck, Sarah, Mary, Stefan, Casey and Carina were reminded their respective entries into this world, and they considered how they differed.

Chuck probably had the easiest entry into the spy world and all that it represented, he was kept out of it initially due to Graham's machinations. Graham had wanted to keep him isolated and vulnerable (and therefore malleable) until he deemed the time to be right. When he'd manoeuvred the necessary elements into place (Sarah mainly) he'd ordered Bryce Larkin to send the current version of the Intersect to Chuck and wipe out any other copies and hence initiated his plan to team up Chuck with his perfect partner and mate. The fact that Casey was forced into the mix by outside parties was a hiccup to Graham's plans, but for Chuck and Sarah it was a benefit as Casey was a necessary element of the team and Chuck's development (and he and Sarah also helped each other find their way back to being "human"). With his partners, Chuck learned to handle and excel in the spy world, without having to go through the soul destroying processes that most (and them in particular) were put through, so yes, he went through a lot in the time he was part of the spy world, but he'd managed to get through it without having the people close to him strip his soul from him.

Sarah's experience of the spy world (as she'd laid out in the overview she'd given Chuck when she was trying to find her worth when she was pregnant with Jaqui and Piotr) was much more of a soul destroying process. From the time that Graham arrested Jack in order to use him as leverage against her, she was forced to endure and do the most disgusting things imaginable, all in the cause of keeping her father alive, and safe. All the sex, killing, torture, intimidation, lies and everything else had pushed her into the position where, by the time she met Chuck she'd doubted in herself that she had any soul left at all. She hadn't told Chuck all the details about what she'd gone through and been forced to do, she was truthful with him but it hadn't been the whole truth, as she just couldn't bring herself to tell him everything. She was still convinced at that time that he wouldn't be able to love her if he knew everything (and she'd also done a good job of suppressing memories of the worst details, at least she did until the BI went through her head like drain cleaner and brought all those memories to the surface again). Afterwards she'd understood that Chuck could, actually, love her despite all the disgusting details, but just couldn't face going through that again.

Rescuing the baby who became Molly had given her a glimmer of hope but she'd still felt that she, herself, was so sullied by then that she didn't believe that she could be around her without staining her as well. That was much of the reason that she just dropped the baby off with her mother and left them, yes she was afraid that Riker would be able to find them through her, but the main reason was that she didn't want what she was (in her mind) to affect their lives and drag them down. Then she met Chuck. It took him three years to batter down the walls that she had created to protect decent people from the monster that she perceived to be inside her, and make her see and accept the measure of goodness and worth that she did have inside herself.

Casey's experience wasn't as bad as Sarah's, he understood after they had dug all of their records out of the various agencies' files that nearly everything he'd been told to convince him to agree for Alex Coburn to "die" and John Casey to be "born" was a lie. He never would have washed out of the Special Ops training, he was the best there was even then, but they'd known that Kathleen was pregnant and therefore had to sever any connection that he had with his old life, so they told him he was a wash out and then dangled a chance at redemption in front of him. They also took the phone off of him when it was apparent that Kathleen was about to tell him about the pregnancy to prevent her doing so. He was conned into the spy life by one of the cronies of the one who dragged Emma into her analyst role, and they were quite prepared to destroy as many lives as it took to perpetrate their plans. Casey had gone through the various trainings, given his background as a sniper, they focused on his close combat methods (firearms and martial arts), technical skills, interrogation, languages, and seduction skills. (This last was obviously a failure, but one of the things that they found in his records was what Roan had recorded as the real reason for Casey's repeated failure of his training, that being that why he was unsuitable for those roles was that he had an unshakable commitment to a woman in his past and that he would not do anything to betray that commitment to her. Now that he was back with Kathleen and they were finally married it was quite obvious who that woman was. When Casey asked Roan about it, Roan had to admit that he'd maintained himself in such a pickled state over his own moral conflicts that he'd actually forgotten that detail until the BI cleared away the blockages.) As they kept Kathleen and the baby as the ace up their sleeves to use against him, they couldn't dangle them over his head the way they dangled Jack over Sarah's, so they went with the "duty" and "greater good" approach, deluging him with the propaganda until he was well enough indoctrinated to react when the bell rang, as it were. Without the constant threat to loved ones to push him harder, Casey's career "achievements" weren't as outstanding as Sarah's, but over the quarter century that they had him he was one of the very few with enough kills and mayhem to his name to rate being on the same score card as Sarah, so there was a lot on his conscience, too. It took Chuck to redeem Casey's soul, too, little wonder that the powers that be had hated Chuck so much when he had habitually destroyed their "best" agents.

Carina's story was fairly similar to Sarah's, she was a habitual criminal by the time she passed her mid-teens, and her record and exploits had come to the attention of Graham, as well. Graham had arranged for her to be arrested like he did Jack, but without a third party to use as leverage against her, he used a prison that was generally believed to be only a legend. Unfortunately it wasn't a legend, it was an actual prison that may as well have come out of those sick exploitation movies, the women there were continuously defiled by the guards, other prisoners and anyone else that they were farmed out to, no-one ever lasted more than a year before they died from their treatment or killed themselves, and most didn't last six months. So Graham gave the seventeen year old version of Carina a tour of this prison and told her that she would work for him and do everything she was told to, or she would end up in there. Looking him in the eye Carina knew that he would follow through on his threat without any qualms, so she agreed to work for him.

Carina went through the same training as Sarah did, ALL the same training. She didn't score anywhere near as high as Sarah in many fields (she was only human), but she did score better than just about everyone else, because she had the image of the prison that was waiting for her if she failed in her head to push her on. By the time Carina left the training facilities she was pretty much empty, she wasn't up to Sarah's level of skills with technical issues or combat, so she did what she had to to keep successfully delivering the mission objectives (and stay out of that prison). That meant that she became Graham's most effective sexbot, just as Sarah had become his most effective killing machine. As her genetic and other test results weren't up to Sarah's on the attributes he wanted for a potential breeding partner for Chuck, Graham traded her off to the DEA for favours and political support (on the understanding that he could get her back if he needed her). It was when she came back into Sarah and Casey's lives that things started to change, she'd known both of them professionally and personally (Sarah more than Casey, but she knew him well enough), and while she wasn't Sarah she was one of the best, so the change in both of them was obvious to her. It didn't take her long to identify the cause of the changes, the so called analyst who could make best trained and experienced agents turn away from their orders and do the "right" thing, and who had refused her multiple times, even after she'd stripped almost naked to entice him. As she said to Sarah, Chuck had infected her with his affliction, too.

Mary was closer to Casey's story than the girls', she was recruited at university as a bright young thing, eager to save the world, she went through much of the same training as the later entries, but Graham's predecessors weren't as blatant about forcing women to be trained to perform in bed, so that aspect was mainly handled by being shown and non-sexual tests. She was very good at weapons and combat (for her day), she wasn't up to Sarah or Casey's level (possibly not even up to Carina's level), but she was far and away better than any other woman agent of her day. She was a very successful agent, very rarely failing to deliver on missions and she was quickly building a name for herself. Even then, Graham was an up and coming force in the agency, and he managed to get his testing process imposed on agents who caught his eye. When Mary's genetic and aptitude tests supported what he was seeing as to her capabilities, Mary was flagged for his plans. Then, when the eccentric genius of Stephen Bartowski came to the CIA's (and Graham's) notice, Graham knew that the opportunity he'd been waiting for had arrived, so he arranged for Mary to be allocated as Stephen's handler and engineered the scenario where they had to project a strong romantic connection for their cover story. As they were both bright and attractive (much like Chuck and Sarah), a real attachment began to form and once again, Graham engineered the scenario to push it into a sanctioned physical relationship, and then marriage.

Once Eleanor and Charles were born, Graham ensured that the CIA doctors that were assigned to treat them did the testing that he required, and the results were everything that he could have wished for. To ensure that they were raised to fit into his plans the way he wanted he set the wheels in motion for Hartley Winterbottom to become Alexei Volkoff, and then get "stuck" there (knowing that Stephen and Mary would do whatever necessary to protect their friend until they could fix the "error" that locked him into being Volkoff). Of course, once Mary went to Russia with a suitable cover story to keep an eye on Alexei/Hartley, it was a simple matter to leak the fact that she was CIA to Volkoff so that she had to do some fast talking come up with a story that would keep herself alive and protect her husband and children, but that solution kept her locked into Volkoff for the next twenty odd years. The attachment that Volkoff had to Mary came out of something that was actually coded into the persona by Stephen, a mechanism to allow her to get close enough to him to protect him under the original (short term) plan. Unfortunately Ted Roark's hacks to the program messed with that, as well as the expiry date, so the attachment that Stephen that coded became an obsession which meant that Mary hardly got a chance to get out of his sight, let alone escape. So Mary was stuck there for over twenty years being the enforcer for one of the biggest psychopaths in the criminal world, and didn't manage get back to her family until Chuck and Sarah rescued her.

Stephen was basically dragged into the spy world through his own naivety. He was a brilliant engineer and inventor, and he wanted to share his discoveries with the world, so when he was offered government grants to allow him to further his work, he jumped at the chance. Within six months he was locked into secrecy agreements and assigned "protection" by the CIA. There were a few on the protection team, but the one who worked with him the most (as she was bright and technically qualified enough to fulfil the role of his lab assistant) was Mary. Working together nearly every day and with her being required to "fill in" on night protection details with him fairly often (thanks to Graham), they became close fairly quickly, which then fed into Graham's plans for the "cover" relationship and hence into the situation where he "allowed" them to have a real relationship and a family together. Stephen was still rather naive about the spy world at that stage, he had only began to be suspicious when Hartley's Volkoff persona "failed" and he was locked into that person. When Mary was exposed and hence stuck with Volkoff after her identity was "accidentally" leaked to Volkoff, Stephen was sure that this was all a setup, and he decided to actively take on the CIA, Volkoff and anyone else who tried to prevent him recovering his wife, and his children's mother.

Unfortunately for Stephen's plans, when he loaded an early version of the Intersect for testing purposes, the rough code that it contained (the primary the reason that it needed testing) affected his mental stability quite a bit and "crazy old dad" was born. He tried to hold it together for the kids, do his work and mount the hunt for Mary, but he accepted that it would only hurt them to watch his decline, so he left to find a safe place to try and fix the intersect, and search for his wife. He tried everything he could, but the best he could do with the intersect was to devise the governor which managed to halt (or at least slow) the degeneration in his head, so he never went back to the kids until Sarah tracked him down for Chuck. For a while he tried to keep an eye on them, but the government and others were always hunting him, so after he'd had a few close calls he decided that he needed to stay well away from them, to prevent leading his hunters to them. Over the years he acquired quite a few spy skills, not the physical aspects, but he became quite accomplished at getting into and controlling government and other systems, hunting information about Mary and staying at least one step ahead of his pursuers. In the course of trying to evade his pursuers he ended up being forced to kill many of them, blowing up buildings and aircraft and numerous other things to evade capture, and that hung heavy on his conscience. It was only when Chuck's searches for him pinged his security controls that he began contacting Chuck on-line to try to help him, and because he'd missed his children. He had thought that he could talk to him as Orion without upsetting him, but that didn't quite work out the way he wanted it to.

Once the sessions with the "children" were done, all of them were solemn after they'd considered how they had joined the world that Chuck and Sarah's lost children were moving into now. They knew that the others (Chuck especially) knew parts of their story, but none of them were up to discussing the matter just then. Some other time, perhaps, but now it was just too raw, and that was showing on their faces. Chuck and Sarah and Mary and Stefan went off for some private time to deal with their memories before that had to face anyone else, and Casey had his arm around Carina's shoulders as they left, knowing that she needed support as well. As they'd looked at each other before they left the room an unspoken understanding passed between them, they knew that neither of them had a partner who could understand what they'd been through or done, so if they needed to talk about it, they would be there for each other.

**A/N: Well it doesn't look like this format is working for anyone, given the way that the limited interest being shown has apparently dissolved to none. Unless someone has any inclination otherwise I think it's probably easiest to give up on the story.**


	3. Clone Wars

**OK, giving this one more try to see whether it's going to fly. One thing I realised when I was telling wilf21 about what I was trying to do is that the first 2 chapters should probably be looked upon as set up chapters to explain the landscape here, given that we've jumped over ten years from the end of the previous story (the fact is that I wasn't totally happy with it myself, but I only realised about the set up aspect when I was trying to explain it (guess that's what happens when your creative brain doesn't choose to share its intent with the rest of you while it's writing), so thanks).**

**Usual disclaimer for the land of Litigation, no rights to any characters portrayed.**

BGRU (over twenty five years after they formed, the organisation still avoided labelling itself, to better hide in the shadows) was starting to ramp up their activity now, so they obviously felt that they were strong enough to take on the powers that be (and Carmichael Industries, the label that they still used for the clan). The clan now had several (much bigger) versions of the Castle Computer at the Quantum Concepts sites around the world to run their searches and investigations, and their satellite facilities surpassed most countries', so they had plenty of bandwidth and resources to run continuous searches on anything and everything that they'd identified as being part of (or even being affiliated to) BGRU. That was why they started getting hits all over their systems as soon as BGRU started moving.

They did advise those government representatives that they maintained relationships with of the changes as soon as they'd noted the spike in activity, but with the expansion of the clan via the lost children and other resources that they'd recruited, they were more inclined to deal with the threats directly (as they could never know what level any external organisations were compromised to). That was why Clan Carmichael started gearing up as soon as they saw the movement from BGRU. While some of the clan's old school had stepped back, Ellie, Stefan, Jeff, Emma and Diane (she may not be as brilliant as a Bartowski, but she had over half a century's experience in mounting and running major operations in that space and knew better than most what to look for, and how to handle things when they arose) were still overseeing the support side of any operations against BGRU, and Chuck, Sarah, Casey, Mary and Carina were leading/running the operational side, backed up by Zondra, Josie, Heather, Alex, Charlie, Yvonne, Zack, Jaqui and Piotr (and the operational people recruited into Quantum Concepts). All of the lost children now had the BI and had been trained well enough that their parents and the other leaders of the clan believed that they were ready to join the affray, so they now made up the bulk of the clan's "army". One big advantage the clan did have was that no-one outside of the clan knew about the BI, and therefore they didn't have any idea how far beyond "normal" human capabilities most of the Clan were with the BI.

As they'd been seeing for more than five years now, a lot of the BGRU activity was showing the Graham stamp. As far as they knew, there were over a hundred Graham clones on that side, and as much as they'd rather not have to admit it, the fact was that that sick bastard had to have been brilliant to pull off what he did over his decades long reign of terror, so no-one wearing Langston Graham's face should ever be discounted as a threat. That was why the clan double checked all intel before they moved on anything that they identified, and tried to quietly pick off the "low hanging fruit" by taking out smaller operations which didn't show signs of the Grahams before they moved on the larger and more obvious targets. The clan still used the same tried and true tactics that they'd used since before BGRU rose its ugly head, take down the facilities, strip out any and all potential sources of intel and personnel who could have intel, then extract everything they could from what they took to get links to other parts of the organisation.

While the tactic wasn't new (it was centuries old, in fact), it was still a valid and effective one. They were steadily building a picture of where BGRU (and possibly more importantly, the Graham clones) were, and what they were doing, they were also whittling away at the strength of BGRU by taking out the myriad small groups as quickly and quietly as they could (BGRU's policy to keep direct communication to an absolute minimum to avoid discovery helped them here, as they could knock off small groups and no-one would notice for some time that they weren't there), so they were slowly eroding their power base and narrowing in on where the more important locations were, getting ready for the inevitable war.

Ironically, a significant portion of the prime players in this war had all been created by Graham, as the clan's clone army of the lost children (and the "naturals" that they were based on) were up against BGRU's Graham clones, the Graham clones may not have made up the bulk of BGRU's fighting forces, but they were a lot of the prime targets. The indications to date pointed to the Graham clones being a major influence in the rise of the new BGRU, and if that was so it meant that they were, indeed, walking in their "father"s footsteps, and had to be dealt with before the situation got out of hand.

The war of the clones really broke out about ten months after they first noted BGRU starting its push. Chatter from BGRU suddenly picked up and they were talking about the missing groups. This chatter naturally led to orders being circulated to initiate their plans before it was too late, and thereby the clan's hands were tipped and they moved in. They were backed up by government strike teams in about 2/3 of the strikes, in the rest the teams were purely made up of the clan, but they hit twenty sites simultaneously, sweeping through them to eliminate or neutralise any resistance, grabbing any source of intel (electronic, paper based or biological) and destroying the sites to ensure nothing was left that could be used against them, before moving on to the next most important site on their list. (They reversed their previous practices for this purge, they were taking out the biggest and highest priority sites first and then going down the list, the reasons for this were twofold, the first and most important was to maximise the impact on BGRU, if they got stopped at any point they wanted to hit them hardest while they still had the element of surprise, to hurt BGRU as much as possible, also, they expected to lose people from their teams in the fighting, so they hit the sites where they expected the hardest fighting first to give themselves the best chance to win, after that the theory (OK, hope) was that they could still conquer the smaller sites with less resources.) The teams hit well over a hundred sites that day, and captured over 75% of the Graham clones (hopefully, given that they'd picked up 80 of them).

Because of the need to spread out and strike as many sites as possible at the same time, Chuck and Sarah had to separate to run their own strike teams for the first time in decades, and they hated it, but there was no way around it. This whole exercise dragged them into many things that they hated, and they'd wanted to put behind them a long time ago, but as long as they were in the sights of the other side, they had to do those things they didn't want to protect the family.

For all that both sides knew that the operations were being run by Clan Carmichael, the identities of nearly all of the clan were hidden at all times. Stefan and Chuck (with input from Sarah) had designed and created "tactical suits", head to toe armoured suits that would protect the wearer from pretty much any small arms fire up to .50 cal (plus bomb blasts, as well as biological, chemical and nuclear threats), without restricting movement much at all. While in the inactive state, the suits were black, but multiple camouflage patterns (plus active camouflage) could be activated to mask the wearer from discovery (simpler forms of this applied to the weapons coatings as well, using a form of e-paper), the suits also masked/retained heat signatures so that they avoided being picked up by IR cameras and allowed them to communicate with each other without worrying about the noise giving them away, as they were effectively soundproof. As the suits were worn at all times during the operations and generally only Chuck, Sarah, Casey, Mary or Carina opened their visors for meetings, all most people on either side ever got to see were head to toe covered figures. Yes it was strange that over a third of them were the same size and shape, and another third also the same size and shape, but it wasn't inconceivable that Carmichael Industries would take on board a majority of big men and tall women, so that fact didn't give away much (if anything) about the lost children's identities. The "CI" team were, to all intents and purposes, over three hundred faceless tactical suits that didn't talk much on operations. (But carried lots of weapons, most of the bigger ones carried four "normal" CI pistols in thigh and shoulder holsters and a pair of CI hideaway pistols in the small of their backs, plus a CI SSW as their main armament. The smaller ones carried that same pistols, but generally (not always) replaced the SSW with a CI assault rifle.) The family, at least, generally did the majority of their training wearing the tactical suits so that they were accustomed to fighting in them, many of the other QC operations personnel did the same, but there was less pressure on them to do so.

After the purge, it took weeks to do the "interrogations" of all the personnel who had been taken in the operation. The first priority was the Graham clones, Chuck and Sarah were reminded how hard it was to get anything out of the original Langston Graham (other than the stories that he wanted to tell), and how well he had played them when he was interrogated. (They had realised at least fifteen years before that he had managed to withhold anything about the clones and most likely the majority of his main plans under torture, because he hadn't slipped at all.) As much as they hated the idea of the more extreme forms of torture that were recorded in the Intersect, they had found with Quinn, Riley and the erstwhile Ring Director that those forms could succeed when the more traditional forms failed to get the information they needed, so they (and Casey) used the Intersect liberally when they were interrogating the Graham clones. What they got out of them was worrying on many levels, not only about the details they learned about current plans and schemes of BGRU, but also (and even more so) because the clones obviously retained memories from the original Langston Graham. Under interrogation they corroborated each other's stories about what Graham's breeding and cloning plans were, as well as many more of Graham's deeper (and more twisted) plans. The fact that they managed to get the information that they hadn't previously gotten from the original Graham was an advantage, but the fact that the clones carried the memories as well as the mind of the monster that they were born from was terrifying, because that meant that the ones left out there were still capable of acting on those plans. Once the interrogations were concluded, no-one asked what happened to the subjects, because that was known, if not discussed. Once they had given up everything they were disposed of (usually by a few rounds to the head), and immediately cremated, their ashes were added to fertiliser being manufactured nearby to the cremation site to ensure that there was no DNA evidence, and no chance of any material being collected for any possible cloning experiments.

While the interrogations were going on, Stefan, Ellie, Jeff and Emma were leading the teams cracking the encryption on any files and analysing all of the intel that was collected from the BGRU sites. As the intel was analysed, it was added to the models that they had for BGRU (creating geographical and organisational maps, filling out operational and personnel profiles and records, initiating searches on any new facilities, personnel or associations identified in the new intel that they had etc) They still had to locate the remaining 25% or so of BGRU (and especially the rest of the Graham clones, given the frightening new information that they had about them), but the information that they'd collected from over a hundred of their bigger and more important sites seriously increased the probability of their being able to do that.

QC (well, the clan) still followed the practices that they always had, in that any intel discovered that related to government officials or government or other organisations within a "friendly" state was shared with the head of state for that nation. This was the primary safeguard that QC and Clan Carmichael had, they assisted many of the countries of the world in protecting themselves from enemies from within (or operating within their boundaries), and as a result of that most countries supported QC (or the clan) when others came after them. As the clan's focus was on BGRU and the like coming after them, they lost nothing in sharing the local threats that they discovered with the powers that be in the various countries (unless they were totally corrupt or tyrannies), and that created considerable goodwill for the clan (or QC, same thing) around the world.


End file.
